[calex59]

My first Job(s) were cutting grass for so called neighbors. We lived in a rural area so people were few and far between. One of our customers(my brother and I teamed up)didn't believe in mowers, hand or power, but insisted we cut her grass with hand sickles. Her son, one of my classmates, evidently was to damn lazy to do it, so my brother and I got the job. Hard work for a flat rate of 3 bucks apiece, if we finished the job. Took us many hours to earn that 3 bucks.

Our other mowing jobs paid an average of .50 per hour. We did ok for that time period(early to late 50s).

My first real job was working with a contractor as a laborer on a house building job. A classmate of mine also was hired on. My brother turned the job down(can't remember why but I think it was because he had started taking girls out and he didn't want the job to eat into his time), my friend and I earned 90 bucks apiece(after taxes) working about 5 weeks in the hot summer sun. That was a fortune in 1957 for a high school kid.

The area also had many commercial chicken houses. We would get jobs for one night catching chickens and stuffing them in crates for shipping, the pay was a whopping 2 bucks an hour(an unheard of wage in those days for laborers) for a minimum of six hours work, sometimes it ran into eight hours or longer. Wow, what a soft touch, we thought.

[RipSawyer]

“Wow, what a soft touch, we thought.”
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Indeed it was, that two dollars an hour would have been convertible into two REAL SILVER dollar coins per hour back then. How much would those two silver dollars be worth in today’s money? Probably enough to make a lot of people want to chase chickens.